About us

Our primary purpose is the joint reporting and publication of investigative journalism
with a focus on European topics to understand how power structures affect European communities.

Cooperation

The basis for cooperation among EIC member organizations is the regular sharing of information and
consultations on possible story ideas. We have regular meetings and work on several fronts: tackling
European stories; finding, compiling, processing or analyzing big data-sets; developing under Free
Software license our own Network collaborative tools, platforms und information design.

We take a long-term approach and therefore involve in our collaborative projects the generation #25
to work together with senior reporters and editors.

Membership

This is a non-exclusive Network, meaning that members can be part of other Networks, but only one
medium or media outlet from each European country can be an EIC member, ensuring national
exclusivity.

Coordination

Stefan Candea is coordinating the Network communication, workflow and tools development. Each
investigative collaboration will have him working closely with the story initiator to decide on the
work plan, tools and publication schedule.

EIC Board

The Board of EIC decides on EIC partnerships, membership, future developments and the agenda of EIC General Assembly. The Board members are journalists working with the EIC member newsrooms. Current Board is made of Alain Lallemand (Le Soir), Jörg Schmitt (Der Spiegel), Yann Pilippin (Medipart), Zeynep Sentek (The Black Sea) and Alfred Weinzierl (Der Spiegel) who is also the Chair of the Board. Jörg (joerg.schmitt [at] spiegel.de) is currently EIC.network outreach officer.

Here are our governing principles:

In a healthy network all nodes (participants) should profit from the network;

Keep the network alive, open to fresh ideas and people following new suggestions on
partnerships;

In order to achieve a healthy growth, better network density and kick-starting the whole
process, we will act as a laboratory for networked (investigative) journalism;

We start with basic research projects that would also be used to establish networking
tools and collaborative platforms;

Decentralize the network's decision making process on new stories, new partners, new
projects;

Understand and follow a set of predefined routines for each new project.

We believe networks are here to stay. Due to their structure and methodology, collaborative networks
are one of the few mechanisms able to keep up with the globalized power structures (ie. governments,
corporations), thus becoming the only way forward for investigative journalism.

EIC is putting together different mind-sets, organization types and skills. This is insuring a flow
of new challenges, ideas and approaches. Our aim is to build a European network to focus on
independent, high-quality cross-border and European investigative journalism projects.

The members of EIC are

partners

Discussions related to establishing this European Network started in 2015 and
involved Jörg
Schmitt,
Jürgen
Dahlkamp,
Alfred Weinzierl and Klaus Brinkbäumer
from Spiegel and Stefan
Candea from the
Romanian Centre for Investigative Journalism. Alain Lallemand from Le
Soir
joined the group, and later John
Hansen from Politiken,
Milorad Ivanovic from Newsweek Serbia, Florian Klenk from Falter, Paula Guisado from El
Mundo, Vlad Odobescu from The
Romanian Centre for Investigative Journalism, Michael Bird from The Black Sea, Fabrice Arfi from Mediapart and Vittorio Malagutti from L'Espresso.

EIC partners are pulling together resources to do investigative research but
also to develop tools and information design. We are building tools under a Free
Software Licence
and the lead developer is DER SPIEGEL IT department, but all EIC member organizations commit
themselves to contribute.

During the coming months EIC will decide on future partnerships related to
stories or tools
development.

Projects

How the EU pays Turkey to keep out refugeesAn investigation by Danwatch, Politiken, and The Black Sea with the European Investigative Collaborations (EIC) network looks into the programmes paid for by the EU to Turkey to keep refugees out of Europe.
Contracts show that the EU bought 83 million Euro worth of military vehicles, surveillance equipment and patrol boats for the Turkish military to seal and police its borders with Europe and Syria, which experts argue might contravene international humanitarian law.
In-depth research into the six billion Euro EU-Turkey refugee 'Facility', signed in 2016 and financed by European tax payer money, reveals that it suffers from lack of transparency, slow implementation, harassment by Turkey of NGOs partners, and a rush to play politics.

This investigation analyzes the criminal policy instituted by the first prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC), Luis Moreno Ocampo.Court Secrets is a project by EIC.network which will publish a series of articles based on over 40,000 documents, financial statements, diplomatic cables and correspondence, cross-checked with public sources.

The Malta Files show how the Mediterranean state works as a pirate base for tax avoidance inside the EU. Although profiting from the advantages of EU membership, Malta also welcomes large companies and wealthy private clients who try to dodge taxes in their home countries.Over the last three months, EIC.network has dug into hundreds of thousands of documents that show how Malta operates a tax system where companies pay the lowest tax on profits in the EU.
This damages the budgets of other EU-countries and reveals a weakness in the European Union, which allows member states sovereign rights over their taxation.

The largest leak in the history of sports reveals murky financial transactions in the world of European professional football and exposes the tax tricks employed by some of the Continent's biggest stars.The data includes 18.6 million documents, including original contracts
with secret subsidiary agreements, emails, Word documents, Excel
spreadsheets and photos. The data set extends into the year 2016.
EIC partners will publish their findings in the coming
weeks, allowing for an unprecedented look into the gloomy depths of the
modern football industry.

East Europe’s shadow gun market is fuelling terrorism in the west, as criminal gangs use legal loopholes and open borders to traffic weapons.An international team of journalists who are part of the newly established network European Investigative Collaborations has spent three months detailing how Brussels’ failure to impose comprehensive directives has facilitated the sale of deadly weapons.

In 2016, European Investigative Collaborations (EIC) started publishing
in-depth reportage focused on events critical to Europe. The network
currently includes more than 100 journalists, information-designers and
technologists working together on specific large-scale projects. Due to our
many meetings and conversations, small groups of journalists in our network
discuss ideas for cross-border stories and publish articles that enlist the
talents of the reporters from our pool of professionals. Links to such
stories are listed below.